Four ways to get back to yourself

Client Centered Therapy

Marina Khazanova, client-centered therapist

“To feel what it means to be yourself, you can only allow yourself to experience everything that happens to us. If something hurts, accept that it hurts us. If something makes us happy, do not be shy about it and express our joy. Do not deny in yourself what you don’t like, but admit: this is also part of my “I”. Client-centered therapy allows you to express any feelings and emotions in an atmosphere of safety and freedom. At a meeting with a therapist, the client talks about what worries him, upsets, angers or makes him laugh, what he is not sure about, what he likes or dislikes about himself. The therapist listens – attentively, respectfully, trying to understand what is happening, what the client is experiencing. His task is to be near and unconditionally accept the patient, that is, internally agree with what he is at the moment. This helps the interlocutor to stop being afraid of his feelings, to become closer to himself. The creator of this method, the American psychologist Carl Rogers, was sure that “every person is positive by nature” and strives for internal development and spiritual growth, but unfavorable conditions and circumstances prevent this. After client-centered therapy, many begin to feel better, literally. A person acquires the ability to assess the situation based on their own values ​​and act in accordance with their interests. He becomes calmer and more confident, copes with troubles more easily, treats people better and trusts himself more.”

Gestalt therapy

Nifont Dolgopolov, gestalt therapist

“During a Gestalt therapy session, we explore the client’s experiences, their values ​​and desires, and teach them to be attentive to themselves. After all, as long as a person refuses to recognize this or that feeling in himself, he cannot be completely himself. This method helps to realize oneself, to understand one’s real feelings and desires, to feel the boundaries of one’s “I”. When these boundaries are strong and flexible at the same time, it is easier to adapt to the world around you, including to other people, without whom it is impossible to satisfy your needs. Direct questions help to define your boundaries (and sometimes build them): “Who am I?”, “What is most important for me in life?”, “What values ​​uXNUMXbuXNUMXbdo I consider mine?” An important part of the work is the recognition of one’s own rights: “I have the right to be different from others, I have the right to say no, I have the right to any feelings, even if they are unpleasant for someone.” By recognizing our right to be ourselves, we will be able to determine what of what we have is useful to us and what is not. Gestalt therapy also helps when we want something, strive for something, but cannot achieve it in any way. In this case, the task of therapy is to “complete” this experience, and not necessarily in a positive way: sometimes we may admit that it is simply impossible to achieve what we want. As a result, there is a feeling of lightness, because we are freed from what we cannot make “ours”, and open to new opportunities.”

Integrative kinesiology

Olga Troitskaya, psychotherapist

“Integrative kinesiology, like other methods of body-oriented psychotherapy, works with experiences and sensations “imprinted” in our body. This method is aimed primarily at working with the consequences of psychological trauma, which, even many years later, can have a devastating effect on a person’s life. Our body instantly reacts to danger, preparing to fight or flee. But the body can behave in the same way even when there is no real threat. For example, speaking at the defense of a diploma, a student suddenly becomes speechless and covered with red spots. It turns out that once at school he was ridiculed and humiliated after speaking in front of the class. In a similar situation, the body “remembered” that incident and, deciding that the situation was threatening, launched a stress response. At the moment of danger (real or apparent), reflexes work. Our method, with the help of special exercises, helps to “remove” the automatic reaction that prevents a person from being aware of the situation and acting adequately. We teach to listen to our bodily sensations, to be aware of our reactions to a particular movement. And we offer to do the exercises until the client feels that this is enough for him … Performing them, he observes the changes taking place in himself. He asks himself questions and listens to the bodily reactions that appear in response to them. Such experiences help him to further distinguish his impulsive reactions from genuine feelings.

Psychodrama

Elena Lopukhina, psychotherapist

“Psychodrama is a method of group psychotherapy that was developed by psychologist Jacob Moreno in the early twentieth century. However, this approach is also widely used in individual therapy (monodrama). Psychodrama is the study of the inner world of a person and his relationships with other people through role-playing. Moreno believed that our personality consists of separate interacting parts (or roles): the wider the repertoire of these roles, the better things are with mental health and personal development of a person. In a psychodrama session, the client, with the help of other members of the group, recreates and explores in action the complex world of his relationships and experiences. As a result, for example, he can understand how his “fearful” part blocks the one that strives for a happy life. In psychodrama, we not only meet with different parts of our personality, consider how they affect each other and our behavior, but we can also replace the mechanisms of interaction of our roles with more mature and productive ones.

In the process of work, the client becomes both the creator and the protagonist of his drama. He dramatizes significant events in his life, acting out scenes related to his problem as if they were happening at the moment. “Dramatic” is understood not as theatricality, but as dramaturgy: after all, a person, like a playwright, can review and remake the events of his life.

You can talk about the inner world in figurative ways. To work with a client, we choose the one that is closer to him: with the help of a group, he can act out a dream, tell a fairy tale, embody a metaphor of a state, reproduce a scene from life … One of the advantages of psychodrama is that not only the client, but everyone acquires the experience of self-knowledge members of the group. They compare what is happening with their feelings, life experiences and begin to better understand what is happening to them.